


the undone and the divine

by rainbowagnes



Series: and here is the tabernacle. reconstructed [2]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: But still! Domesticity!, Emotional intimacy.gif, F/M, Future Fic, Peppered with mentions of murder because This is Ketterdam, Post-Book 2: Crooked Kingdom, coffee (referenced only), domesticity!, introspective, mornings and other terrible things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 16:35:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20660324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: She’s good with her fingers and better with knives, and as she runs the razorblade over the rough stubble on his jaw, she makes far fewer mistakes than he ever did. The feeling of her fingers on his face is almost familiar now, even if it takes much of his considerable focus not to flinch under her touch. Both of his hands are wrapped tightly around the cool enamel sides of the sink. He can’t flinch, of else her hand will slip and gash his face open.Maybe that’s a blessing. He’s best at playing games with stakes.





	the undone and the divine

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently writing plotless and mostly dialogue-free Kanej rambling is my thing now? Regression to earlier adolescent states on the advent of massive change or some shit like that. Anyway! Hope you enjoy! 
> 
> This was a scene I sort of thought of for the general plot of "in secret, between the shadow and the soul," but as it was kind of it's own thing and from Kaz's point of view it got chopped out to be its Own Thing. 
> 
> References to homicide and other pretty canon-typical violence, but references only. 
> 
> title from "bedroom hymns" by florence and the machine, because of course it is

It’s like that first time they tried in the hotel bathroom, when he sort of fixed her bandages and kissed her neck and fell into a million pieces, right there and then. Except it isn’t like that at all, because this isn’t their first time anymore, and this is his bathroom, in a house that’s got his own false name on it, and because she isn’t cut and bleeding on the counter. The raised scars from Dunyasha’s knife stand out along her bicep against the melange of other cuts and scars, older and newer, a story in survival wrapping out from under the loose straps of her sleep shirt.  


It’s not like that first time, because they are not the people they were then, because the five years between then and now, the distance as much as the closeness, have done something he hopes might be healing but that is at the very least walking forward.  


It is like the first the first time because they are here, in a fancy tiled bathroom with steam enough to bead on their skin and make their clothes stick. It is like that first time because of the way they’re positioned, him standing in front of her, her perched on the sink with her knees wrapped around his hips, but with something tighter now, almost like possessiveness. She is nobody’s but her own, but he is hers and always will be.

She’s good with her fingers and better with knives, and as she runs the razor blade over the rough stubble on his jaw, she makes far fewer mistakes than he ever did. The feeling of her fingers on his face is almost familiar now, even if it takes much of his considerable focus not to flinch under her touch. Both of his hands are wrapped tightly around the cool enamel sides of the sink. He can’t flinck, of else her hand will slip and gash his face open. Maybe that’s a blessing. He’s best at playing games with stakes. Mostly, he just needs to calm himself, blank out his mind, focus on the rhythm of her breathing, the way it hitches now and again. 

He can trust her hands better than his own. One of the older louts in the Slat’s bunkroom had demonstrated the best angle to slit the throat of a Razorgull panhandler who’d edged onto their turf and on another occasion he’d received instruction in how to most convincingly cut the wrists of a scab who’d ratted some rum smuggling operations to the Staadwatch so as to make the man’s untimely under-custody death resemble, in certain lights a suicide. As such, Kaz had a acquired a good working knowledge of several practical uses of a razon blade, but no one had ever taught him how to shave. 

She doesn’t need to say anything, just tilt her head sideways, but he knows to turn his head anyway and let her fingers find purchase again. It’s not about power, but it is about control. His own body, his soul if such things exist, has proven itself the most difficult man Kaz Brekker has ever tried to control. It’s about the control they have over themselves, his wrists and throat bared to her. She could destroy him right here and now with only a slip of her blade, and he’d gladly let her. 

Instead she runs the pads of her fingers lighlty over his cheeks, looking for places she’s missed, and, finding none, sets the razor down on the enamel lip of the sink with a light clink. She retracts her knees and jumps down, circling back to her own mirror to plait her hair. He does that for her, sometimes, he’s getting better at getting the wispy bits at her temples and the nape of her neck into the braid proper. He turns the hot water on. These mercher types waste their hard-stolen cash on all means of useless crap and expensive, random posturing, but Kaz’s gotten far more accustomed to hot water on tap than he’d dare let anyone back at the Slat know. Anyone who calls him soft is still more than welcome to a bareknuckle fight. No one’s yet bested him. 

(There’s no such thing as a bareknuckle, empty-handed fight in the Barrel and if you think there is, then son you’re got too much honor to make it out of here alive.) 

He wastes a minute or so of water until it runs hot over his hands, not feeling terribly broken up about the extravagance. The Ravkan name for Kerch isn’t Vodyzemly without reason. He splashes it on his face, washing the soap and lather from his face, feels the cooling rivulets of water running down his neck and seeping into his shirt, feels her eyes on him. He knows she knows he knows she’s watching. His fingers run along the bottom edge of his sleep shirt and he turns to her, looks her in the eye in one of their thousand silent questions, and peels the shirt off- slower then he needs to, yes, perhaps preening slightly- at her small, decisive nodd. Yes. There’s the tension of the fight in both their shoulders. 

He’s conscious, so conscious, of her gaze on him now. When he was small he’d follow the older kids through the fields at the harvest, tying up the bundles of grain they threshed with waxed farmer's twine. Even after the weather turned cold, the boys insisted on working with their shirts off, the girls on shoving their shirtsleeves up and their necklines down. He didn’t understand then. He understands now more of why humans do things like this that they have no need of doing. He has a bathtub now, in a room with a door that locks and he didn’t in the attic of the Slat, but he likes doing this, here, knowing that her eyes are on him and that she’ll probably scold him for indecency in the next ten seconds. 

(She doesn’t. He’d be almost disapointed, if he couldn’t hear her breath hitch.) 

So instead he splashes hot water on himself, liking the bite of it, running a washcloth up his neck, under his arms, along the planes of his chest. He might not be Nikolai Lantsov, exactly, but this is one part of his self he’s never been uncomfortable in. 

He reaches all the way around her to pull a towel from the shelf. He’d ask her except that she looks almost flustered, and that’s a rare thing for the pirate known as the world-shaker. She’s always beautiful, he knows, but there’s something about the rare handful of mornings like this one, carved from the hard living of legend-building, all their armor cast aside. The sea-dark curtain of her hair loose and unbraided over her shoulder, the bare inch of skin at her waist where her shirt rides up or the thick Fjerdan cardigan she wears against the chill that hangs almost to her knees. She sits on the kitchen counters with both her hands wrapped around a massive mug of coffee while she interrogates him on the various doings of Ketterdam’s sketchiest traders. He tells her the worst dirt he knows while he tries to keep eggshells out of the frying pan. Once he had to throw out an entire skillet of eggs and sausage out she cracked up laughing at the rundown of merchant council’s current tetrahedron of cheating. 

Not a drop of grisha blood in either of them, breakable and fallible and flesh-and-blood as can be, but sometimes it feels like the other is one of the only people on earth they can be human around. 

The towel still wrapped around his shoulders, he loops his thumbs into the waistbnd of his tartan sleep pants and pauses. Another question. Sometimes speaking makes it harder to breach topics like this than gesture. She shakes her head, strongly, not now, not today, and he nods, yes, of course, raises his hands to awkwardly run them through his steam-damp hair.

“Wait, Kaz,” she says, holding a hand out and, very slowly, he laces his fingers through her own. There’s flecks of shell-blue varnish on her nails and a faint tracery of floral designs wrapping around her forearm all the way to her knuckles. He hadn’t noticed when she came in from the sea on the east wind last night. “Kiss me. Please.” 

He does. 

And then he kisses her again on top of her head, breathing in the salt and soap scent her hair has now, and heads downstairs to get the morning coffee started. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts, ideas, prompts? General chit chat? HMU @tsarinazoya


End file.
